Mexican Reporter's Asylum Bid Rejected Despite Death Threats
Mexican Reporter's Asylum Bid Rejected Despite Death Threats
Published 28 July 2017
Nine journalists have been killed in Mexico since the start of the year.
A journalist who escaped from alleged persecution by the Mexican army has been denied his asylum bid by a Texas immigration court, more than nine years after he left Mexico.
On July 13, Judge Robert S. Hough rejected all of the evidence presented by Emilio Gutierrez Soto.
The 53 year old Mexican used to work in Ascension, in northern Chihuahua state, as the correspondent for the Diario del Noroeste newspaper, based in Ciudad Juarez.
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Mexican-Reporters-Asylum-Bid-Rejected-Despite-Death-Threats-20170728-0016.html
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Mexican journalist asks judge for US asylum
By Will Weissert
Associated Press / January 21, 2011
EL PASO, Texas—A journalist from Mexico pleaded his case for asylum in the United States on Friday, more than two years after he fled across the border with his 15-year-old son because of receiving what he called death threats for his critical coverage of the military during his country's bloody drug war.
Emilio Gutierrez Soto said he spent about seven hours presenting his case to Immigration Judge Robert Hough, but the process moved slowly because of frequent objections from the U.S. immigration attorney assigned to the case. The hearing, which was closed to the public, adjourned without concluding.
After the hearing was done for the day, Gutierrez said he presented hundreds of pages of documentation in support of his request, and that the attorney for the government raised objections every few pages. One problem was an improper translation of a document prepared by Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights.
"I feel that the attorney was delaying the case to stall for time and keep our expert witnesses from expressing their opinions," Gutierrez said. "We are talking about an immigration judge and an immigration attorney whose job it is . . . to keep from expanding the abundance of people looking for protection because of the violence in Mexico."
More:
http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/01/21/mexican_journalist_asks_judge_for_us_asylum/?page=full
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Study: Border Judges Deny Most Political Asylum Petitions
A new analysis of the decisions of U.S. immigration court judges finds that at least two of the five immigration judges in El Paso have a far higher denial rate than the national average. What accounts for the disparity is a matter of debate.
BY JULIÁN AGUILAR JULY 31, 2011 5 AM
The Mexican journalist Emilio Gutiérrez has sought political asylum in the United States since June 2008, when he and his teenage son fled the small town of Ascensión, Chihuahua, in the pre-dawn hours and arrived at the Antelope Wells, N.M., border crossing.
Threatened by the Mexican military for his reporting on its alleged human rights abuses, Gutiérrez says returning to his native land is a certain death sentence. Whether an asylum judge will agree, however, is far less clear.
A new analysis of the decisions of United States immigration court judges finds that at least two of the five immigration judges in El Paso, where Gutiérrez’s case is being considered, have a far higher denial rate than the national average. The report, by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan center based at Syracuse University that tracks the enforcement activities of the federal government, analyzed the decisions of 265 immigration judges across the country who have ruled in at least 100 political asylum cases in the last five years. On average, over that period, immigration judges rejected 53.2 percent of asylum applications.
But William L. Abbott and Thomas C. Roepke, both judges in El Paso, had a combined rejection rate of 83.3 percent in 346 cases — most from Mexico and Central America — decided between 2006 and July 2011. Roepke denied asylum requests in 96.7 percent of his cases — the third-highest rejection rate among the judges included in the Syracuse report.
More:
https://www.texastribune.org/2011/07/31/border-asylum-judges-deny-most-petitions/